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Southwestern Historical Quarterly

newer works on European expansion to the Americas and then into NorthAmerica, digested and synthesized them, and presented us with apanoramic view of greater breadth than historians are supposed to be ableto provide in this age of the monomaniacal monographer. His successmay be due in large part to his professional background: he is not ahistorian but a geographer. He tends to see human experience areally,first, and then politically, religiously, etc. He thereby innocently stepsover such bottomless pits as puritanism and the origins of representativegovernment, pits into which legions of orthodox historians have marched,never to be seen again. For instance, he sees Massachusetts Bay Colonyas being important as the center of a "Greater New England" (p. 100),in which Nova Scotia is significant and antinomianism not worthmentioning. He sees all of the West Indies and the whole coast fromMaryland to New Orleans not primarily as a unit where Europeans per-formed various experiments in political and economic organization, butas "Afro - North America" (p. 423), where blacks comprised one-thirdand often much more of the population. In other words, his version ofAmerican history is the old story told in a fresh and provocative way.For those of us who despaired of ever again interesting our students inearly American history, much less reinteresting ourselves, Meinig's bookis a revelation.This massive work is a clear signal not only of a fresh approach, butthat the anti-establishment interpretations that sprang up-sometimesrankly-in the period of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam Warhave not been lost in the Reagan era. Their fibers are now part of thebasic weave of our appreciation of our past. Meinig is not an iconoclast,and a few may call for more about Afro-Americans and Amerindians thanhe has-included in this book, but he has included vastly more about non-Europeans than can be found in the classic large-scale interpretations ofAmerican history. Where in Hubert Howe Bancroft or Edward Chan-ning or Samuel Eliot Morison would we find an assessment of the birthof the United States as sad and as wise as the following:For indigenous peoples in the outlying territories who had no wish to bepart of the United States, the American president was a man to be feared,the direct analogue of czar, emperor, and sultan; for Creeks and Cherokees,Chickasaws, Shawnees, Winnebagos, and many others, the new city ofWashington was what St. Petersburg was for the Finns, Peking for the Miao,or Constantinople for the Serbs- the seat of a capricious, tyrannical power.(pp. 369 - 370)This book is a masterpiece in the best and old sense of the word, i.e.,a proof offered by a craftsman that his skills have advanced to the point